Personalization, speed and responsiveness are, today, the cornerstones of customer satisfaction. And as brands and retailers continue to acknowledge the importance of customer experience as a competitive differentiator, there’s an increasing understanding of the value of AI in helping them to achieve those differentiated experiences. While AI was once (very recently) a nice-to-have element in a brand’s CX strategy, it’s quickly become integral for the delivery of outstanding customer experiences.
In this article, we’ll explore how to harness AI to turn customer interactions into unique, compelling experiences that foster loyalty and unlock growth.
How to use AI to improve the customer experience
AI and the customer experience have become intrinsically linked in eCommerce. It’s AI, powered by rich and detailed customer data, that’s allowing brands and retailers to deliver highly targeted, personalized experiences at a scale that’s never been possible before.
And with the ever-increasing availability of AI services and tooling, businesses are finding new and exciting use cases both for artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.
Let’s dive into some of the most impactful use cases for using AI to improve the customer experience.
Driving personalization in retail
It’s easy to understand why personalization is at the top of the customer demand list. A shopping experience that’s specifically tailored to your needs and preferences is far more likely to inspire you to purchase (and probably very quickly). From personalized product recommendations to alternatives for out-of-stock products and cross-selling in product categories or sets, brands and retailers have a huge opportunity to improve their customer experience which in turn, improves engagement and leads to higher conversions.
Where personalization was once limited mainly to targeted offers, the opportunity now extends to the end-to-end customer experience, with multiple personalized touchpoints driven by AI-powered data analysis of customer data such as preferences and past shopping behavior. In the best personalized experiences, retailers don’t just offer similar product recommendations, they offer complementary ones, basically pre-empting the shopper’s next search when for example, buying a full outfit for an event. Past order data can provide useful cues about activities such as ordering gifts for birthdays or anniversaries, and by leveraging AI, retailers can use this data to send personalized email reminders to the shopper. Most customers will be more likely to make repeat purchases when they can do so by clicking a couple of buttons, rather than starting the whole browsing and purchase process again from the beginning.
By removing friction from the product search or purchase process, retailers encourage more purchases and increase customer loyalty, which is easy to do with AI technology enabling efficiency at every customer touchpoint.
Enhancing the visual content experience
If there’s one frustrating thing about shopping online, it’s a lack of visual content. We all know of a retailer that only offers one or two product images or reuses the same campaign imagery season after season. To maximize conversions, brands and retailers need to make the shopping experience as easy and seamless as possible for their customers – which means high-quality product imagery, and variety in product imagery, to help them in their buying decision.
An MIT study found that the human brain is able to process images in just 13 milliseconds, so retailers just have a few seconds (or less!) to catch a buyer’s attention and leave a good first impression. We’re visual by nature, and images are what spark our interest and desire for a product.
Amplience’s AI Image Studio gives marketers and merchandisers the freedom to quickly ideate and generate new assets using generative AI, without having to rely on their Creative teams and the incredibly long lead times that often accompany creative briefs. Not only does this increase efficiency, productivity and agility amongst digital teams, but by quickly generating asset variants for different campaigns and channels, marketers and merchandisers are improving the content experience for their customers, increasing the volume of content in the buyer journey and optimizing for different platforms to maintain a cohesive and performant omnichannel experience.
Increasing the volume of inspirational content
In addition to high volumes of visual content, shoppers also need inspirational, text-based product content to aid their buying decision. Providing rich product descriptions, blog posts and buying guides that answer customer queries and inspire them on how to style or pair products is a sure-fire way to increase customer engagement and ultimately, drive conversions.
Using generative AI allows marketers and merchandisers to quickly create product stories that sell. Our Content Studio uniquely understands brand context such as audiences, tone of voice, product data, location, seasons and events to produce high-efficacy, contextual content fast, and at greater volumes than a human could produce alone. In addition to generating content, Content Studio can augment and validate content, ensuring it’s SEO optimized for maximum search performance, and generating variants for different channels and formats.
In 2023, research by Gies College of Business found that focusing on inspirational content instead of promotions can increase overall sales by 13-31%. Unnati Narang, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Gies, said: “Our research shows how engaging shoppers with inspirational messaging that retailers can easily deliver through mobile devices lead to more purchases than promotional messaging.”
The use of generative AI for content creation also empowers marketers and digital teams to be more reactive, quickly capitalizing on opportunities that arise from trends or cultural moments. And relevancy is a key factor in the buying decision, one that continues to influence shopper behavior and overall brand perception. Retailers need to continuously update and refresh their content, and ultimately, the shopping experience, to keep customers engaged and encourage them to keep coming back for repeat purchases.
AI is integral in the delivery of differentiated customer experiences
AI empowers brands and retailers to deliver on personalization, improve their content offering and increase the availability of rich product information to help drive purchases, creating a fast, efficient and enjoyable shopping experience for their customers. AI offers retailers a competitive advantage and as the industry evolves, it’s only becoming more integral to the delivery of an excellent customer experience.
Don’t get left behind, contact us today and find out how Amplience can help you deliver consistently compelling content experiences that delight and inspire your customers.